Gidday out there.. I would like to sell my laptop and i dont know how to empty it. can i save everything to a external drive? If so    will the PROGRAMS STORED on ext hard drive be able to be sent to a new laptop ??When you say 'empty it', do you mean completely erase everything before you sell it?

Also, are you looking for a way to, for example, copy everything on the current computer and put it in another one?G'day to you BushyMic.

Probably the easiest way to CLEAN out your hard drive is to reformat it.  You can do this by booting from a boot-floppy or boot-cd, depending on what resources your computer has, and typing "format c:" at the prompt.

You can certainly save all of the contents of your hard drive to an external hard drive, and there are various ways of doing this.  You will need to tell us more about what computer resources you have available so you can be BEST advised.

It is unlikely that all of your software could be restored to the new computer just by copying from the backup.  A lot of modern softwares, especially the more sophisticated programs like Ms Office, must be run from a proper setup disc.  If you have the ORIGINAL discs for all of your software, copy them to the C: drive (space permitting) before making the backup, then you can restore them afterwards.